She sat back down and poured herself more vodka. “Someone is calling here from your apartment,” she said.
He threw back the rest of his vodka. “I should go,” he said and got up and headed for the door. She followed him. At the door she watched him grasp the front knob and twist it firmly. He opened the door wide, blocking the mirror.
“Good night,” he said. His expression had already forwarded itself to someplace far away.
She threw her arms around him to kiss him, but he turned his head abruptly so her mouth landed on his ear. She remembered he had done this evasive move eight years ago, at the beginning, when they had first met, and he was in a condition of romantic overlap.
“Thank you for coming with me,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” he replied, then hurried down the steps to his car, which was parked at the curb out front. She did not attempt to walk him to it. She closed the door and locked it, as the telephone began to ring again. She turned off all the lights, including the porches’.
She went into the kitchen. She had not really been able to read the caller ID without reading glasses, and had invented the part about its being Pete’s number, though he had made it the truth anyway, which was the black magic of lies, good guesses, and nimble bluffs. Now she braced herself. She planted her feet. “Hello?” she said, answering on the fifth ring. The plastic panel where the number should show was clouded as if by a scrim, a page of onionskin over the onion — or rather, over a picture of an onion. One depiction on top of another.
“Good evening,” she said again loudly. What would burst forth? A monkey’s paw. A lady. A tiger.
But there was nothing at all.
SUBJECT TO SEARCH
Tom arrived with his suitcase. Its John Kerry sticker did not even say “For President,” so it seemed as if John Kerry might be the owner or designer of the bag. “I have to leave,” Tom said, sitting down, scraping the chair along the pavement, setting the suitcase beneath the table.
“Before you eat?” she asked.
“No.” He looked at his watch.
“Then order. Order quickly if you have to. Or you can have my salad, if you’d like.” She indicated the watery romaine on her plate.
He scanned the menu, then put it down. “I can’t even read right now. Is there couscous? Order me the lamb couscous. I’ll be right back.” He grabbed his cell phone. “I’m going to the gents’.” His face had a grip of worry beneath the sun-beat skin; his body was lanky and his gait lopey but brisk as he wended his way inside. The suitcase stayed at the table, like a bomb.
She summoned the garçon with a gesture that was a hand flutter quickly pulled away lest the teacher actually call on you. She had no ear for languages — in that way she took after her mother, who once on her French honeymoon, seeing a “L’Ecole des Garçons,” had remarked, “No wonder the restaurants are so good! The waiters all go to waiter school!”
“Pour mon ami, s’il vous plaît,” she said, “le couscous d’agneau.” Was that right? Did one pronounce both esses, or just one, or none, as in cuckoo, perhaps requesting a small musical bird from the park? When lamb was a food, was it a different word, the way pork and pig were? Perhaps she had ordered a living, breathing creature mewling in broth and fleece. The waiter nodded and did not say, “Anything more for you, madame?” but turned quickly and left. The outdoor tables were apparently all his this afternoon. It was April and the weather had changed into something oppressively lovely, with an urban breeze of garlic, diesel, and hyacinth. Where she ordinarily lived, there was not the same oniony, oily air of possibility as you walked down the street. Winter prairies choked the air clean. And spring was a brief, delicate thing quickly overtaken by tornadoes.
“Here,” Tom said, when he returned, trying to lighten the mood. “I think you may have left your notebook in the loo.”
He handed her a small open notebook, clearly his own, in which he had written the lyrics to Peggy Lee’s “Fever.” Exclamation marks and curlicues decorated all the lines. As did a small game of tic-tac-toe. At the bottom a page read, “Fish bite the least / when winds blow from the east” and “What is destiny, if you have to ask?” Also, “I love your hair the way it is, for chrissakes.” That it seemed hilarious made her think, This has always been the man for me.
“I have to fly back to the States,” he said. He put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. She found the few people she’d known who moonlighted in the international intrigue business to be very high-energy, but there was also a price paid; Tom now seemed tired and defeated. He glanced up and added, “You know, the intelligence world: we’re not James Bond. We’re puny, putrid graspers and gropers, deciding things at home from our laptops, playing on a field that is far too large for us.”
“Didn’t Richard Burton make a speech like that in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold?”
“That was the speech.”
“The laptop part?”
“You gotta let a guy improvise. Did you order?”
“Oui, monsieur.”
“Merci.” He smiled. She knew that he liked it when she said anything in French. His specialty was languages, including Urdu and Arabic, although only an hour and a half of Urdu, he declared, and then his mind turned into a blank blue screen. “And actually only four hours of Arabic,” he said. “And maybe even only five of English: five hours is a long time to keep talking.” Decades ago he had driven cars for a living, from Holland to Tehran, a drug runner (though he had not said this, she had surmised). Then he was recruited by American officials to teach the Shah’s guards’ children.
“What did you teach them?” she had once asked.
“Critical theory,” he’d said, his face lit with a desire to amuse. “Movies and Marxism. Of course not real Marxism, nothing so practical as that. Nothing like here’s how you kill people and throw them in a ditch. No, we did very abstract Marxism. Very ivory tower.”
“Ha ha,” she’d said.
“I taught the kids English,” he mumbled in a defensive tone, “and some of their parents as well.”
“Did you feel the Shah was all that bad?” she had asked and then received a long strange lecture on Chiang Kai-shek and the doubtful, simpleminded shelvings of various historical figures. She believed that in the photographs of the embassy hostages, the handsome blindfolded one, tall and bright-haired in the embassy doorway, was Tom. She herself had been a teenager at the time and had only decades later stumbled upon the photo online; the likeness took her breath away.
But he had said no, he had gotten out a month beforehand. The closed-then-open-again secrets of his work enchanted and paralyzed her, like the frog who fatally acclimates to the heating water.
He paid for everything in cash.
“Everyone looks bad now,” he’d said. “Not just the Shah.”
Now he held up the carafe of Côtes du Rhône, raised his eyebrows optimistically, and cocked his head. His hair was the color that strawberry blond became in middle age: bilious and bronze, as if it had been oxidized then striped with white like a ginger cat.
“No wine,” she said. “It leads to cheese.”
She had hoped to lose weight in time for this trip, but alas.
“You must not say anything if I tell you this.” He paused, studied her, considering.
“Of course not.” Did she look untrustworthy? Why did she not seem like a person of integrity, which she felt she was. It was gracefulness she was perhaps missing; people confused the two.
Tom poured some wine and drank. “In London they are reporting torture incidents involving American troops in a Baghdad prison. Someone took pictures. It is a disaster, and I have to get back.” He took another swallow.